Investigating grisly crime scenes on a notorious strip dubbed 'Murder Mile' would be a baptism of fire for most trainee detectives.
But for Damian Allain, the scourge of knife crime and shootings in Peckham, south-east London, in the late 1980s was what spiked his interest in becoming a homicide detective for Britain's biggest police force.
Having served 31 years in the Metropolitan Police, the former detective chief inspector has been confronted with harrowing crime scenes that most of us will never face in a lifetime.
It's a far cry from what you see on BBC hit drama Silent Witness, he admits, joking that you wouldn't have a pathologist, in this case actress Emilia Fox, 'running around trying to investigate the murder'.
From finding a bloodied woman beaten and strangled to death in the shower cubicle of an office to staring down at the disfigured face of a man who was burned alive in the boot of a car in a twisted revenge plot, Mr Allain has seen it all.
